USNS Fred W. Stockham is one of 14 ships to be reloaded at the Maritime Prepositioning for Program at Marine Corps Command. The Honeywell crews at Blount Island have 60 to 90 days to complete repairs on the ship’s equipment.

An amphibious assault vehicle is repaired for redeployment by a team from Honeywell at Blount Island. The Maritime Prepositioning Program allows Marines to be deployed anywhere in 10 days. The ships must be repaired every 36 months at Blount Island.

Jeffrey Moore crouched over a container of antifreeze Wednesday. He was running a test, making sure it had the right temperature and, with his goggles and slow determination, he looked like any mechanic anywhere.

The difference can be found in the vehicle the antifreeze came from: a Medium Tactical Vehicle Replacement, or "7-ton." In layman's terms, it is a workhorse with six wheels used by the Marine Corps.

Moore is an automotive mechanic with Honeywell Technology Solutions Inc., the group that maintains the Maritime Prepositioning Force program at Marine Corps Blount Island Command.

The program allows for the Marine Corps to be anywhere in the world within 10 days. To do so, the military maintains three squadrons across the globe. One is based in the Mediterranean Sea, one in the Pacific Ocean near Guam and one at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Each one can sustain roughly 15,000 Marines for up to 30 days if they are deployed at a moment's notice.

The equipment the squadrons use — from tanks to food and everything in between — is kept on 14 ships. Those ships are each required to come to Blount Island once every 36 months. When they do, Honeywell — through a 10-year contract signed in 2009 valued at $700 million — sees that each piece of equipment aboard them is running correctly.

Recently with the U.S. military withdrawing from Afghanistan and Iraq, Blount Island crews have been seeing thousands of tanks and assault vehicles coming back from the Middle East. Honeywell gets those items ready for the country's next deployment.

"What we're in the business of is saving lives," said Robert Campbell, site leader for Honeywell at Blount Island.

Once a ship arrives, it travels down a 3,600-foot slipway and its equipment is off-loaded. Crews working around the clock, usually for about seven days.

Equipment is then taken into a 300,000-square-foot maintenance building known as "Big Blue" where repairs, checks and maintenance are done.

That is where Moore was working Wednesday. Not far away from his work station, a couple of mechanics were trying to figure out why an eight-wheel Logistics Vehicle System was having hydraulic and steering problems. A little farther down, a 5-ton truck had been recently outfitted with armor.

Putting armor on is a big job. Sometimes, though, the job could be to simply put a spark plug in a Humvee. The Honeywell crew, about 600 people at Blount Island, also works on amphibious-assault vehicles, tanks, generators and communications equipment.

Apart from "rolling stock," Honeywell also fills hundreds of 20-foot-long containers on every ship with repair tools, medical supplies, fuel and water — anything a Marine might need during combat.

"Do they have shelf life?" said Douglas Hill, operations manager for Honeywell, said of the gear in the containers. "Well, if you download it at 35 months, it's going to work. It's not going to degrade."

Honeywell crews typically have 60 to 90 days to complete repairs on a ship's entire equipment load. Once everything is done, the ship is reloaded. In all, a typical load weighs roughly 57,000 long tons.

The USNS Fred W. Stockham is the most recent of the 14 ships to be reloaded. The 900-foot-long ship was sitting at Blount Island on Wednesday as a massive crane lifted massive containers onto its deck. Inside the ship, on its five levels, were 384 "rolling stock" that will depart back toward the Indian Ocean during the next week.

"When we load a ship up, we like to go out there and watch it go down the slipway and deploy," Hill said. "That's very satisfying. We know that we're putting ready-to-go equipment board that ship, so someone with a uniform can actually go and use that equipment."

Lt. Col. Richard Steele, commanding officer at Blount Island, said the Marine Corps is "tasked to be the most ready when the nation is least ready. That's what we're all about."

What happens on Blount Island helps make that sense of comfort possible, he said.